Thursday, August 21, 2014

On Designers & Dragons: Q&A with Shannon Appelcline

A few weeks ago Evil Hat launched the Kickstarter for a new edition of Shannon Appelcline's Designers & Dragons, a four-volume comprehensive history of the role-playing industry. Appelcline, a designer with roots at Chaosium has become an important historian of gaming. He's presented historical notes for the digital releases of classic TSR materials, offering insight and putting these products in context. Appelcline generously offered to answer a few questions via email about the books and his research. You can see my thoughts about Designers & Dragons in a separate, parallel post here. 1. I rode down to Gen Con with a gamer who has been playing
since high school but who gave me a blank look when I mentioned companies like
R Talsorian or even the more recent Eden Studios. What does Designers
& Dragons offer to gamers in general and to modern rpg’ers in
particular? Why should they be interested?

Most obviously, Designers & Dragons offers
our history: how we got to the 40th anniversary of roleplaying in 2014, and who
we should remember along the way. It includes all the fun stories about your
favorite companies that you probably don't know about. However, you point to
the other cool thing about Designers & Dragons: it details the
history of all the companies that you don't know about — the
tales of their designers and the games that they produced. It doing so, it
might just open up your roleplaying repertoire to something new.

To offer an example: I had pretty poor knowledge of the
indie movement of the '00s before I started writing Designers &
Dragons. I was plenty familiar with their predecessors from the '80s —
games like Ars Magica (1987), King Arthur Pendragon (1985),
and Paranoia (1984) — but as with many gamers I'd mainly
settled with the games that were out when I was in college. Since writing Designers
& Dragons, I've discovered whole new realms of roleplaying
possibilities. I've used some techniques from an indie game called InSpectres (2002)
in my current Pathfinder (2009) campaign, and I'm playing with
the possibility of using Burning Wheel (2002), Dungeon
World (2012), or 13th Age (2013) as the basis of my
next campaign. Those are all games that I learned about by writing Designers
& Dragons — and that others might learn about too by reading the
books.

2. You mention the Egbert incident and the resulting crusade
against D&D as paradoxically a major boost for TSR and RPGs in the early
1980s. Were there other factors you saw during this (or other boom periods)
that really fed success- cultural, social, media, literary?

There's no doubt that James Egbert incident — where a
college student went missing and D&D ;got blamed nationally
— multiplied the success of D&D (and roleplaying).
However, our industry was on a pretty steep upward slope ever since D&D's release
in 1974. If you look at some of the self-reported financial data from TSR,
their sales were doubling year over year (and then doing better than that when
Egbert came along).

The "why?" is a much tougher question. I think
roleplaying's success started because D&D offered a unique
take on gaming that let players take a very personal investment in a game. This
was quite different from the miniatures wargames that preceded it. I also think
that D&D initially prospered because of the wide-spread
cultural interest in the Lord of the Rings in the late '60s
and early '70s. Finally, you have to consider the lack of other interactive
entertainment at the time. Board games that were more sophisticated than the
typical family fare were still pretty scarce, and you didn't yet have video
games. You put together a product that fulfills all those varying desires, and
it's not a surprise that you get something that's very popular — and that
helped roleplaying boom for almost a decade, into the early '80s.

We of course saw another big boom from 2000-2003. That one
seems to have been driven more by internal pressures — by the fact that people
were initially willing to purchase any "official" D&D/d20
products, no matter who published them. The early 21st century may also have
seen a roleplaying industry that was old enough that lapsed gamers could come
back — and d20 got enough publicity to bring some of them back into the fold.
However, I suspect that the resurgence of fantasy interest led by the Harry
Potter books and the Lord of the Rings movies helped. Heck,
MMORPGs may even have fed into it. A rather surprising twist in the 21st
century is that fantasy and science-fiction have become cool again.

3. You’ve done an amazing job covering all corners of the
industry during these periods- including some significant controversies over
money, credit, and IP. What was the most challenging part of doing this
research?

Thanks for the kind words.

In general my research focuses on a two-part process. First
I hunt down company profiles, design notes, interviews, press releases, and
podcasts involving the principals of the companies. I use them to build a
narrative. Then I talk with any principals that I can so that they can review
my work, and we can see if any mistakes or misrepresentations crept into the
history. I've had two problems with this process at various times.

First, some companies aren't represented in the written
record, which makes writing their histories troublesome. Lou Zocchi's
Gamescience was one of the most difficult. There was no doubt that Lou was a
really important person in the early industry, but he didn't tend to write
anything himself, nor did he give many interviews. In the end, I put together
what notes I could from the very scattered references, then I spent several
hours talking to him over a few long phone calls. Because more of the article
was based on a modern-day interview, it's probably not as accurate as something
based on sources from the time, but it's also better than not including
Gamescience at all.

Second, sources were sometimes in conflict either with each
other or with a principal's very strident beliefs in the modern day. I had to
weigh what to trust and what to write if I couldn't figure out who to trust.
Sometimes I opted to drop long-standing rumors from the industry, such as the
whispered claim that Bucci Imports contributed to the demise of West End Games;
it could still be true, but after talking with the people who had access to
West End's financial records, and who absolutely said that the shoe business
wasn't at fault, I was no longer comfortable even listing it as a possibility.
In many other cases I listed the two viewpoints and noted they were in
disagreement.

4. Are there products or publishers you see as so ahead of
their time that it undercut them?

I actually think our industry has done a pretty good job of
responding appropriately to the innovation of games. I think that Cyberpunk (1988)
offers a great example of a game that was very innovative and largely revamped
the science-fiction portion of the industry as a result. Eclipse Phase (2011)
is a similarly innovative game for the modern day, and though it hasn't created
a subgenre of competitors like Cyberpunk did, it certainly
seems to have been successful as a game that once more changes how you think
about science fiction.

When games that were ahead of their time didn't do as well,
I think it was primarily due to other factors. Consider my trio of great
storytelling games of the '80s. Paranoia had great ideas about
how to recreate roleplaying, but it never figured out how to create a
roleplaying campaign, and its line development was very uneven after Ken
Rolston left. Meanwhile, King Arthur Pendragon and Ars
Magica, which reinvented roleplaying in other ways, were both
constrained by their very tight and contained settings. If you move up to the
'90s, Last Unicorn Games' Aria (1994) books had some brilliant
ideas about roleplaying other things than individuals, but I think their
complexity kept anyone from ever playing the game. Though none of these
before-their-time games were huge hits, I don't think it was the innovation
that kept players from embracing them in the mass-market.

With that said, I might have one answer for your question of
an RPG hurt by its innovation: Amber Diceless Roleplaying (1991).
That game was always going to be somewhat constrained because of its very
specific setting and its borderline small-press publication. However, in the
groups that I was part of it, it got a bad reputation because of its diceless
mechanics — which of course were one of the things that made it innovative. If
it'd appeared a decade later as an early indie game, I think it might have been
even more widely lauded ... but, then, there might not have *been* an indie
revolution without Amber (and a few of the other games I've
mentioned from the '80s).

5. My sister bought all of the gaming magazines growing up: ;Sorcerer’s
Apprentice, Space Gamer, Different Worlds, The Dragon. There’s a theme
running through the first two volumes of companies being unsure how to position
magazines and yet investing heavily in creating them. What was the appeal? Is
there anything that seemed to define a magazine with legs vs. one which failed?
Are we past the era of the “magazine”-electronic or otherwise- in gaming?

I love roleplaying magazines too; they were the main source
of my earliest research for Designers & Dragons. However,
I honestly don't think there's such a thing as a roleplaying magazine with
legs. In the end, I'd contend that they all either failed or else were kept
alive as a marketing adjunct for a company's other roleplaying production.

The problem is that magazines are hideously expensive in
time and resources and if you try to get them into the mainstream where they
could sell in much larger numbers, you suddenly run full-steam into a broken
system of distribution where the magazine publishers expect to lose money, then
make it up on ad sales. This is all before the advent of the internet directly
undercut the prime advantages of magazines like news and more personal contact
between creators and fans.

As for their appeal, I think there are a few factors.

First, they're an easy entry point to the hobby. It's easier
to think about a Call of Cthulhu magazine (like Pagan
Publishing did) or a D&D magazine (like Jennell Jaquays
did) or a Traveller magazine (like DGP did) than it is to think
about creating a larger, more coherent supplement for the same system — let
alone a whole gaming system of your own. This is before you realize that it's
actually a lot cheaper to create that more complex supplement, mind you.

Related, in the '80s and '90s magazines were an accepted way
for fans to contribute to their favorite games without getting tied up in
questions of licensing and royalties. Sometimes those fan efforts would also
grow to something more (though as usual, it was typically at the cost of the
magazine itself).

Second, from the point of view of existing publishers back
before the '00s, it was a great way to stay in touch with customers. This was
surely the genesis of early magazines like TSR's Dragon and
Chaosium's Wyrm's Footnotes. In those early days, I think some
publishers also focused on the benefit of altruistically creating a magazine
like Different Worlds or the second incarnation of Space
Gamer that could really help to draw the industry together.

I do think we're largely past the era of the print magazine,
as much as it pains me to say it (and though I have a print subscription to Gygax
Magazine). However, I think that online magazines are still alive and well,
particularly on the fanzine side of things. Great online 'zines like The
Oerth Journal and Star Frontiersman are still around
to various extents, and the next great fan magazine could be just around the
corner.

6. In the first two volumes we see some discussion of the impact
of these American games overseas, in particular on the British scene. I'm
wondering during that period how important the non-English speaking market was?
Were there companies trying to break into it, and if so how much success did
they have? Was there much movement the other direction- games or ideas from
companies outside North America or the UK? (This may be outside what you looked
at, but I'm curious about how role-playing got started in these other
countries).

Designers & Dragons concentrates on the
English-speaking market, so I haven't done a lot of research on the foreign
markets, so take what I say here with a grain of salt.

I know that TSR actively worked at getting into the
international market, so they had licensed companies to publish D&D in
France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and elsewhere in the '80s, then TSR UK began
publishing into a few of those foreign markets directly in the '90s. As for the
rest of the RPG industry: I'd be surprised if many of them were big enough to
proactively seek out foreign publishers, though certainly many foreign
publishers contracted licenses for some of their favorite RPGs.

As for the effect of foreign publishers on the English
market:

TSR actually had an interesting situation where a couple of
the people involved with their French translations ended up working for
TSR.

François Marcela-Froideval was one of the founders of the
roleplaying industry in France and the editor of its first magazine, Casus
Belli (1980-1999), so when he came over to TSR in 1982, he immediately
began working with Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer on core rules for AD&D.
Because Marcela-Froideval was working as an assistant to Gygax it's a
little hard to assess how much he individually contributed to the D&D game,
but he definitely was a part of the teams working on Monster Manual II (1983)
and Oriental Adventures (1985) — though his draft of Oriental
Adventures was entirely revamped by Zeb Cook.

Bruce A. Heard came on to TSR as a French translator in
1983, and later helped to coordinate some of their other translation efforts,
but he'd have a much larger influence on TSR when he became its Acquisitions
Editor in 1985. This eventually led to his creation of the Gazetteer series
(1987-1991) for the Known World. Not only did Heard create TSR's first line of
geographic splatbooks — a few months before the Forgotten Realms books — but he
also oversaw the development of one of TSR's most nostalgic settings.

Overall, I think individual foreign designers are the
biggest way that the foreign market has influenced the US, such as the fact
that Cubicle 7's The One Ring (2011) was designed by Italian
designer Francesco Nepitello.

There have also been a number foreign games that have been
translated into English, but that hasn't worked out that well because
translating books is about as expensive as writing new ones. There was a big
surge in the '90s with translations like Metropoli's Kult (1993),
Target's Mutant Chronicles(1993), Chaosium's Nephilim (1994),
and Steve Jackson's In Nomine (1997) all appearing. However,
none of those lines survived. There have been more translations in recent
years, but it's pretty scattered. A recent influx of Japanese games offers some
interesting future development, but the French Qin (2006) is
one of the few foreign games that seems to be continually supported.

7. Do you have a favorite obscure product or product(s) you
discovered in doing the research?

I think I've fallen in love the most with the small-press,
unofficial D&D ;supplements of the '70s, because there's
this big-screen imagination in them and this ragged sense of newness. You can
tell that everyone is figuring out things for the first thing and it's
wonderful to see the wacky ideas that they came up with because no one had
before. I'd put The Arduin Grimoire (1977-1978) at the top of
that list. I'd known about the books before I wrote Designers &
Dragons, but I hadn't really understood the gonzo craziness that they
contained.